The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act or ARRA) was signed into law by President Obama on February 17, 2009 and the first reporting cycle ended October 10, 2009.

In October the raw data from recipients of federal contracts, grants and loans was posted on the Recovery.gov website, and there were numerous recipient mistakes. As a result some major technical changes took effect in the quarterly recipient-reporting period beginning January 1 which were due January 10. The most significant are:

Agency Information Requirements

OMB instructed each Federal agency to provide key award information to its recipients in order to improve data quality and reduce inaccuracies in recipient reporting. If your agency has not provided the information, refer them to Dec. 18, 2009 Updated Guidance on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act issued by OMB. If the information provided does not match your records or records show that the contract did not contain the required clause, or the project was not identified as an ARRA project, the time is now to reconcile it so a non-compliance report is not submitted on your company.

Correcting mistakes in submissions

Under existing government guidance, recipient mistakes in quarterly reports can be corrected only during a 20-day period after the submission process closes. One new change will allow recipients to correct mistakes on a continual basis each quarter on FederalReporting.gov, the inbound collection website. This change also will permit federal disbursing agencies to view recipient reports and suggest corrections on a continuing basis. This new process will begin after the next quarterly recipient reports are posted on January 30. Recovery.gov will then post corrected data publicly every two weeks, beginning on February 10.

Evaluation

Federal agencies will be required to continuously evaluate recipient and sub-recipient efforts. In particular Federal agencies will work to identify and remediate instances in which:

• Recipients and their sub-recipients that demonstrate systemic or chronic reporting problems and/or otherwise fail to correct such problems as identified by the Federal agency;
• Recipients that demonstrate systemic or chronic deficiencies in meeting its responsibilities to review and identify data quality problems of sub-recipients consistent with Federal agency requirements.

Penalties

Recipients, or sub-recipients, who fail to submit a Section 1512 report, or are persistently late or negligent in their reporting obligations, or who do not correct errors in a submitted report, are subject to Federal action up to and including the termination of Federal funding or the ability to the ability to receive Federal funds in the future. If the non-compliance appears to be fraudulent Federal Departments and agencies are to refer the matter to their office of inspector general.

Can we Help You? Technical Communities can act for you in the market. Contact us for more information. Make sure we have full access to the products or services that are in demand for the "Recovery" funds.